We've Been Here Before: Transformational Resistance, Oral Histories, and Student Activism in California in the 1990s

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: Historicizing for Racial Justice: Reform Schools, Student Activism, and Affirmative Action

Abstract

This presentation is a historical case study of student activism for Chicana/o Studies at UCLA between 1990-2005. The case study is situated during a tense racial climate in California in the 1990s (Pastor, 2018) and its documentation maps how race and racism in California impacted UCLA and how Students of Color resisted racial inequity. Specifically, the presenter utilizes Daniel G. Solórzano and Dolores Delgado Bernal’s (2001) concept of transformational resistance, that derives from the field of critical race theory in education. Defined, transformational resistance “refers to student behavior that illustrates both a critique of oppression and a desire for social justice” (Solórzano and Delgado Bernal, 2001, p. 319). The presenter activates transformational resistance as a lens to locate examples of racial justice in the historical past. Specifically, the panelist identifies the 1993 faculty center sit-in and hunger strike for a Department of Chicana/o Studies at UCLA as examples of transformational resistance. Further, the panelist argues that historical flashpoints--like a sit-in and hunger strike--are largely possible because of a long-term commitment to racial equity by multiple generations of Students of Color. That is, social equity in higher education is achieved over time. The panelist argues for the need to map out the multiple examples of transformational resistance in the past as a historical exercise to help us make sense of contemporary and future Student of Color activisms. In this fashion, the presenter argues that historicizing transformational resistance is an essential part of building a “future oriented historiography” (AERA Call for Papers).
The presenter utilizes Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) call to return to historical sources as a way of challenging dominant narratives that erase the historical experiences of minoritized communities: “history begins with bodies and artifacts: living brains, fossils, texts, buildings…In history, power begins at the source” (p. 29). The presenter activates the “living brains” that Trouillot (1995) mentions via oral history to locate examples of transformational resistance in the past. In her paradigm shifting essay, “Grassroots Leadership Reconceptualized,” Dolores Delgado Bernal (1998) states: “Kenneth Kann writes that there are three types of history: ‘the kind you live, the kind you hear about, and the kind you read about.’” She goes onto say, “The second, when documented as oral history, transforms the first into the third: Lived history becomes written history” (Delgado Bernal, 1998, p. 115). In essence, oral history, when documented, becomes archival, artifacts of the historical past that fill in the omissions and silences in the archives.

Author

• José Manuel Aguilar-Hernández, California State Polytechnic University - Pomona